Wednesday, August 8, 2018

punctuation - Dash and space usage for dialogue interruptions, stuttering, starting over


I'm hoping for guidance on several very similar situations, which I suspect are all meant to be punctuated and spaced differently.


Stuttering



How would you write someone stuttering out the word "you"? Here is my best guess:



“What do y-y-you want?”



That is, hyphens (not en or em dashes), and no spaces. Is this correct?


Starting over a sentence


How would you write someone starting over a sentence, i.e. "interrupting themself"? Here is my best guess:



“That’s— It’s more complicated than that.”




That is, em dash, but add a space after the em dash, since it's kind of functioning like a period. Also, the new sentence is capitalized. Is this correct?


(I'm mostly doubting myself on the space.)


Repeating yourself


This gets tricky, because this is kind of like a stutter, but also kind of like the last example, so I'm confused:



“Who—who are the other candidates?”


Have to—have to make it worth it.


“Saying that isn’t legally binding,” she frowned, again, “and it—it’s not that.”



Here I went with em dash, no space, and lowercasing the repeated fragment. What do you think? Do these three examples even belong in the same category?





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